An organization may have several locations from which it provides goods or services, and thus require employees in each location for a specific time period to support its objectives.
Each employee may request a transfer to one or more locations for a next time period. An awarded transfer request entitles the associated employee to commence an assignment at the awarded location at the start of the next time period. Until the end of the current time period, the employee remains at its current location.
Each employee may also request a leave of absence for the next time period. An awarded leave of absence request entitles the associated employee to take time off without pay for part or all, depending on the awarded leave type, of the next time period. Leave types consist of full period leaves, first half period leaves, last half period leaves, and jobshares. A full period leave provides time off for the entire time period. A first half period leave provides time off for the first half of the time period. A last half period leave provides time off for the last half of the time period. A jobshare consists of two employees who have designated each other as jobshare partners who share the work responsibilities of one person; it is the equivalent of a full period leave for one person.
The quantity of employees required at each location may vary from one time period to another. The organization determines how many employees will be required for the next time period. By awarding transfer requests, the organization is able to move employees from locations where fewer employees may be required to locations where more employees are required. Similarly, by awarding leaves of absence, the organization may temporarily reduce the number of employees at a location where fewer employees are required.
However, system-wide employee seniority is a factor that complicates transfer and leave processing. Let every employee have a unique seniority ranking. For any two employees making the same request, such as a transfer to the same location or for a particular leave type at the same location, the junior employee may not be awarded the request if the senior employee is not awarded the request.
During organization expansion, new hires may be added by the organization to the employee pool. The transfer and leave optimization processor also places new hires at locations that need additional staffing. In order to do so, and due to seniority requirements, it must assure that for every location to which a new hire is assigned, the most junior employee requesting a transfer to that location is granted its request.
An organization that faces the challenge of employees distributed across several locations who not only request transfers to other locations, but also request leaves of absence is Continental Airlines. At Continental Airlines, 9000 flight attendants are domiciled at three domestic, two international, and eleven language speaker bases. Through contractual rights, the flight attendants are permitted to request transfers from their current base to other bases within the Continental Airlines system. Flight attendants are also permitted to request full period leaves, jobshares, first half period leaves, and last half period leaves. As an organized union, the flight attendants of Continental Airlines adhere strictly to seniority requirements. Thus the rights and privileges afforded through seniority with respect to transfer and leave awards are enforced without exception.
At Continental Airlines, the time periods utilized are bid periods which approximate calendar months. In every bid period, approximately 5% of the flight attendant population has a transfer request on file, and approximately 5% of the flight attendant population has a leave request on file. By the 15th day of the calendar month preceding the start of the next bid period, Continental management is required to post the transfer and leave awards for the next bid period. Before doing so, management personnel determine the staffing levels required for the next bid period relative to the current bid period. Anecdotal evidence suggests that flight attendant utilization increases when they are domiciled where they prefer. Thus, there is a desire to award as many transfer requests as possible to increase flight attendant utilization and productivity. This evidence also suggests that flight attendant morale and reliability increases when leaves are granted. when flight attendants are awarded their requests, the entire population of flight attendants benefit through higher morale and fewer unplanned absences. With the flight attendant transfer and leave requests on file, knowledge of oncoming new hires, and knowledge of the required staffing levels for the next bid period, management must balance a desire to award as many transfer and leave requests as possible with the operational necessity to staff correctly and abide by seniority obligations.
Highly skilled Continental flight attendant management personnel with expert knowledge require from several hours to days to manually generate a single set of transfer and leave awards and new hire assignments. In general, the solution adopted in such a time consuming effort is the first that is obtained. Because of the time consuming manual process, there is little opportunity to generate multiple solutions and determine which one best satisfies not only the staffing requirements for the next bid period, but also puts the airline in the best staffing position beyond the next bid period.
Prior art, such as the Pilot Training Optimization System offered commercially by CALEB Technologies Corp. of Austin, Tex., and the paper entitled, “Moving Toward An Integrated Decision Support System For Manpower Planning At Continental Airlines: Optimization Of Pilot Training Assignments”, by Gang Yu, Stacy Dugan, and Michael Arguello, Industrial Applications of Combinatorial Optimization, edited by Gang Yu, Jan. 24, 1998, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston Mass., solve unrelated problems. Such prior art systems focus on scheduling the advancement of pilots for training and future positions with respect to required staffing levels at each position. These systems are primarily interested in determining the timing of employee transitions which are already awarded to the employees.
In contrast, the problem addressed by this invention determines how to award transfers and leaves, and which combination of awarded transfers and leaves best meets the required staffing levels.
The invention described herein provides a means to generate a solution in seconds to a few minutes, and thus in near real time. The employee transfer and leave optimization processor in accordance with the invention is parameter driven in that parameter values and configuration settings may be varied to control the optimization processor. The parameters include the minimum and maximum quantity of awarded transfers into and out of specific locations, the minimum and maximum quantity of awarded leaves by type at specific locations, indicators allowing new hires into specific locations, indicators requiring transfer requests to be cleared (i.e., the most junior request is awarded) into specific locations, an indicator whether to process only transfer requests, an indicator whether to process only leave requests, and an indicator specifying that the required staffing levels be met exactly for the next time period. Because the invention is parameter driven, it can be executed several times with different parameter settings to generate a variety of solutions. With several solutions in hand, a user can converge towards solutions that were not previously attainable through their manual process.
The invention as described herein has been developed by CALEB Technologies Corp. of Austin, Tex., as part of an integrated decision support system. The system manages large volumes of data and employs state-of-the-art optimization modeling and solution techniques to efficiently allocate human and training resources, and attain optimal operational and cost effective performance.